Small Wars Manual

Poems

Chris Santiago

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780578887005
• eBook ISBN: 9781571317971
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Poetry
• Index: Literature

" Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I'll be coming back to the rest of my life." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.

Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, "a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination." In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.

Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago's own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where "stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees" and "even small wars waged // on the living room floor" cause trepidation and harm.

This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors—empire, army, their systems and tools—and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 2.1 — “Note: The poems with numbered titles”
• Restricted
• 3.1 — “Set the table”
• 5.3 — “pyromancy divination through fire”
• 5.4 — “stichomancy uses poetry”
• 6.5 — “Dawn in a shit- / hole country”
• 2.2 — “The surgeon performs surgical strikes”
• 1.2 — “A cadet / is / trained”
• 1.4 — “they calculate parallax”
• 5.1 — “The origin of the world”
• 6.6 — “To uncover an enemy / in the field”
• 14.5 — “The president from Canton”
• 1.1 — “A ‘small war’ / is a state of exception”
• 4.3 — “Eighteen ninety-nine. / A colored private”
• 13.1 — “When Nellie and Big Bill / sailed from Manila”
• 1.3 — “Begin with the visible”
• Two-Man Float, Using Poncho (Figure 1)
• Salvages
• Infix
• Boondock Suite
• Insurrecto
• Two-Man Float, Using Poncho (Figure 2)
• 6.4 — “The cure for melancholy is a good tussle”
• 1.6 — “A temporary language / should be devised”
• 3.3 — “Distance to a camel / is but one form / of memory”
• 6.7 — “A hush / falls across the trail”
• Plate 1 — Regions of the horse and mule
• Hitler Moves East
• Supply
• 11.1 — “It is customary for a child to possess / miniature weapons”
• 7.4 — “Don’t pack with us”
• 6.8 — “The / steel / came from a jeep”
• Organization of a Constabulary
• Small Wars
• Plate 2 — Bones and joints of the horse and mule
• 6.9 — “Darkness is hard to control”
• 14.3 — “Choose—polonaise / or nocturne”
• 6.12 — “azimuth”
• 6.10 — “Always dance / with the hostess”
• Personnel
• States & Capitals
• New Classmate
• Golden Age
• Diagram of a Message Pick-up
• 3.2 — “It is desirable to the Mindanao bleeding-heart”
• 9 — “the aviator / must know the ground”
• 6.1 — “Most of the body / is rain”
• 15 — “expect withdrawal / symptoms”
• 14.1 — “If the President of the United States overturns / an election”
• 4.5 — “The too-long- / didn’t-read version”
• 1.5 — “on the shores of an un- / familiar country”
• 5.2 — “Inland are cities of light”
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author